


A Breeze in the Garden

by Stranger



Series: Shire Reckoning 1412 [7]
Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: M/M, pipe smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-23
Updated: 2018-10-23
Packaged: 2019-08-06 07:41:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16384019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stranger/pseuds/Stranger
Summary: Sam and Merry have a conversation in the garden.





	A Breeze in the Garden

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in late September 1412 (Shire Reckoning).
> 
> Written 2002.

After a week at Bag End with Pippin following Sam around, Merry was almost relieved, when he returned from a long afternoon visit (tea _and_ dinner) to the Bolgers of Bywater, to see Pip curling up with Frodo in the sitting room after dinner. The inhabitants of Bag End must have eaten dinner just now, for there was a plate of sweet shortbread triangles at Frodo's elbow to which both he and Pippin were giving a great deal of attention. 

Frodo hadn't bothered with his pipe this evening, so Merry didn't either. Instead, he scooped up a piece of the shortbread and discovered that it was layered with cinnamon sugar. He scooped up another piece. "Mmm. Who made this?"

"I did," said Pippin.

"You never!" Pippin never had before. Of course, he'd never spent as much time with Sam while Sam was busy cooking for a birthday party of guests.

"I did too," said Pippin. "Sam helped."

"It was Pip doing the work," said Frodo. "I was there. Sam kept him from burning up the kitchen at least once, and of course Sam knows where everything is, but Pip did the best part of it." 

"It was only a little shortbread at the end that wasn't quite burnt. See?" Pippin held up a morsel that was browner than shortbread usually should be. 

Merry tasted it, and found that the cinnamon layer was still sweet even in a crunchy, hard-baked mouthful. "It tastes better than it looks," he admitted. He could imagine the scene: Frodo watching Pippin and Sam, smiling at them with wistful knowledge of what else they'd been sharing all week. Merry realized that he really could imagine Frodo very nearly happy at seeing Sam enjoy himself, no matter with whom or doing what. 

Pippin nestled against Frodo's shoulder and reached for another triangle. "You'd like this one, Frodo. Here." He bit it in half and offered the now-bite-sized remainder to his cousin. 

Merry recognized the gleam in Pippin's eye, and thought, Oh, dear, what's this going to lead to? 

But Frodo said, "Delicious, Pip. Very, very good. Let me pick one out for you."

Merry blinked, blinked again, and said a little breathlessly, "I think I'll have a pipe out in the garden tonight. There's a nice moon and I'd like to try sailing some smoke-rings." He backed out without disturbing the two hobbits on the double seat that was used so seldom that Bilbo's favorite pattern of brocade upholstery was still fresh and bright on it. 

He couldn't grudge Frodo a little flirtation, and Pippin clearly knew what he was doing... as far as Pippin ever thought about what he was doing. Merry wondered how the new Pippin would behave at Great Smials, surrounded by sisters and aunts and not nearly so many other tweens as were at Brandy Hall. This thought took him out past the front flowerbeds and Bag End windows and around to the slope overlooking Party Field. 

He nearly stumbled over Sam, who was sitting on a low, flat stone and looking at the wisps of white-moonlit smoke rising from the bowl of his pipe.

"Well met," said Merry.

Sam looked up from the pipe. "Mr. Merry. Fine evening."

It was indeed a fine evening with a large, nearly-full moon lighting up a few shreds of cloud and making everything in the long sweep of Party Field below them silver with green shadows.

"What are you thinking about?" asked Merry.

"This and that. The moonlight puts me in mind of some bits out of Mr. Bilbo's stories of his Adventure." The capital A was perfectly plain.

Merry sat beside him on the stone slab, which was the first part of a wall built into the hill where it sloped away downward. "What do you mean?"

"Well, there's a kind of writing he told about that can only be seen by the light of the moon, not by sun or candle, and _that_ don't stand to reason." Sam looked up at the moon halfway up the sky.

"It's magic," said Merry, knowing it wasn't the answer Sam was looking for. 

"Even magic ought to make sense," said Sam, sounding exactly like Hamfast or for that matter, Uncle Paladin Took. 

"Why should it make sense? It's magic," said Merry. "Do you know, Sam, I've brought plenty of pipe-leaf out with me but I left my tinder-box in the house. Shall we share and share together?"

Sam felt in a pocket and produced a well-kept little box. "You're welcome to use it and I won't say no. And why shouldn't magic make sense? Everything else does, sooner or later."

Merry thought about Bilbo and magic and a mysterious way of disappearing in plain sunlight, but that wasn't a useful answer to Sam's question. "Bilbo did say the elves had magic and the dwarves made use of it. Hobbits don't need magic so much."

"The magic fireworks at Bilbo's party were prettier than anything I've seen before or since."

"Gandalf could tell you -- if he would." Gandalf had a way of not answering questions that made you forget what you'd asked and even that you'd ever wanted to know, at least until later.

"He told me the dwarves made the ink that only shows itself under the moon."

"He did?" Merry hadn't heard that.

"He and Mr. Bilbo talked about the elves at Im-- Imma... at one of the places Mr. Bilbo went on his way to the dragon's mountain. The elves sing a lot," he added, and hummed a slow tune Merry didn't remember hearing before. It wasn't a Shire kind of tune at all. "That's how Mr. Gandalf sang it."

"Was it to do with the moonlight writing?"

Sam shrugged. "I don't know. But it's an elven tune." He hummed it again: slow but not sad, sighing upward to hover and fade away instead of ending on a beat. 

"You're full of surprises, Samwise."

"I don't mean to be, Mr. Merry, sir."

"Sam..." said Merry. "Sam, that was a compliment." 

"There's folks and times it wouldn't be." He threw a glance at Merry. "Not with Mr. Frodo, not him nor you, but others." 

Merry remembered a summer a few years past when he'd been barely older than Pippin was now, when he and Sam and Frodo had spent a fortnight camping in Bindbale Wood. They'd climbed trees and explored paths and lived on small game (Merry was the best shot with a bow, Sam with a slingshot) and late-summer fruit (Frodo was best at climing trees high enough to get the sun-warmed top fruit) and mushrooms. There'd been no "Mr. Merry" then from Sam. When had Merry grown up? He wasn't even of age! And he was younger than Sam.

"Well, it was a compliment," he said. "What else do you remember from Bilbo's tales of travelling?"

"There was a door in a mountainside that no one could open until the right moonlight showed the key-hole. I s'pose that was magic too. I don't know why I should believe it faster than the writing, but it doesn't sound so daft as disappearing letters."

A door in the mountains sounds more dwarvish than writing, perhaps," said Merry. He'd had a toy puzzle-box made by dwarves from Bilbo once as a birthday-present. He had it still among his favorite keepsakes. 

The two of them sat for a bit in the cool evening, hearing insects and perhaps a bleat from some sleepy animal in the yards behind Bagshot Row. There was just enough breeze to bring the scent of ripening pears and late roses to the edge of the garden. Merry blew a double smoke ring and then tried for a triple one, which came out as two-and-a-puff.

"That's a pretty thing," said Sam, and blew an expansive wide ring that caught the breeze and sailed high but thinned and faded quickly. "I never had much art for it. You do another."

"In a moment." He sat in the splendid moonlight and listened again. Nothing could be heard from the hobbit-hole behind them.

"Those two'll be tucked up for the night by now," said Sam, although Merry hadn't made any gesture to show what direction he was listening in. Sam sounded rather satisfied, not at all unhappy about it.

"They'll be in bed, at any rate," said Merry, and applied himself to his pipe. He tried the triple smoke ring again and got three very pale little circles. Pippin was acting exactly as anyone who knew him would expect, and very much like a hobbit tweenager with friends, cousins, and a lively nature. Why should it bother Merry in the least? 

Sam made another large ring, and a breath of breeze came along and tangled it together with Merry's.

"You know we'll have to leave for Tookland in a day or two," said Merry, finally. "It won't feel like summer for much longer."

"Pippin should see his family before they forget him."

"So he should." Merry still didn't know what to expect of the visit to Tookland. Uncle Paladin and Uncle Ferumbras weren't the adventurous sort of Tooks, and it already seemed that Pippin would be, and Merry only hoped the Great Smials wouldn't explode like one of Gandalf's fireworks when they had to live together. "Pippin will have to work it out himself. But something else worries me, Sam."

Sam sat there, frowning. "What do you mean to say, Mr. Merry?"

"I think Frodo isn't entirely easy in his mind this year, Sam. I don't know what's wrong, or if anything is truly wrong. I do know he thinks a world of you, and you've heard Bilbo's adventure tales nearly as much as he has."

Sam looked up at the moon, the questions back in his eyes. "I don't write them down or study them the way Mr. Frodo does."

"Our dear Mr. Baggins keeps himself a little too close sometimes, I think. He studies the stories and tells them over again, but he doesn't talk about them the way you do. I think he keeps those questions inside, and one day he might decide to follow Bilbo to look for answers."

Sam gaped, and the pipe fell out of his mouth. He picked it hastily out of his lap by the stem. "He wouldn't leave--"

"One day, some day, he might want to."

"He won't go anywhere without me," said Sam, as if he knew it for a fact.

"I hope not. Truly, Sam, I hope not. The Bagginses are a bit mad, you know, and if he does go off, he'll need you."

"You don't think he'd do that now, do you?" Sam sounded alarmed.

"Not now, not soon. I just think he feels those same questions you ask, but a Baggins might go looking for answers from the elves." 

"He won't go alone," said Sam. "He won't."

"That's the Samwise I know," said Merry, and slid an arm around Sam's shoulders for a brief squeeze. There'd been some nights in Bindbale Wood when Sam had been happy to play the tween with him, but it was plain Sam had other thoughts on his mind now. Merry wondered what thoughts he himself might have. He'd had a friendly visit with Estella and Fatty Bolger, who were his cousins through the Tooks. He was aware, for the first time, of looking for something and not knowing what it was. Despite Estella's teasing it was not Aunt Rosamunda's secret recipe for her truly splendid tomato-pickle and egg sandwiches, although he'd eaten all he could hold while he was there. 

Sam's voice recalled Merry to the present. "If he goes to see elves or dwarves, I want to see them too!" 

"And learn more songs, perhaps?" he asked.

Sam subsided abruptly back into meekness. "I'd like that, o'course, but I wouldn't dare to ask them myself." 

Merry doubted Sam had asked to learn Bilbo's songs or even Gandalf's -- he'd just heard them and now he knew them. "You take that chance if you get it, Sam. Have you time for another pipe before you need to go in?"

"Always time for that," said Sam. The moon was high enough now that all of the field was silver, and after he and Sam had filled their pipe-bowls in the cooling evening, Merry tucked his arms around himself for warmth. Sam reached out and pulled him closer with a bit of the familiarity from before Merry became Mr. Merry. 

Merry sighed and leaned into the circling arm, and it occurred to him to envy Frodo the warmth and trust and simple comfort Sam might bring him. "You're a good friend, Sam," he said.

Sam blew his breath out around his pipe-stem in something very like a chuckle. "None of that, Mr. Merry, sir." He didn't even remove his arm. 

"You're a good friend to Frodo," said Merry. "You're a good friend to Pippin, too, in a way that suits Pippin right now. I don't know what he's going to do when we get to Great Smials."

"You don't?" Sam blew a wide, moon-silvered smoke ring that sailed right over Party Field. "I daresay you'll find out when the time comes."

# # # 


End file.
